


Will There be Birds

by Aloice



Category: Final Fantasy XIII Series, Final Fantasy XIII-2, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII
Genre: Contains some mature themes, F/M, Partial Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-24 15:29:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15633525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloice/pseuds/Aloice
Summary: He thinks he’s mourning her a little better than he mourned his childhood.(a collection of snippets, XIII-2 and LR, Hope POV)





	Will There be Birds

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [out in rain](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7280962) by [uraa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/uraa/pseuds/uraa). 



> Because I have no self control and these feelings keep coming back to me.
> 
> First envisioned to be (and truly was) written to Priscilla Ahn's "Dream," then written to the Cinematic Orchestra's "Arrival of the Birds." The quoted poem is W. S. Merwin's "Looking Up in the Garden."

_These trees have no names  
whatever we call them_

_where will the meanings be  
when the words are forgotten_

_will I see again  
where you are_

_will you be sitting  
in Fran’s living room_

_will the dream come back  
will I know where I am_

_will there be birds_

 

When he stops and realizes that Lightning is gone, he doesn’t cry.

 

It doesn’t feel strange to return the knife; it’s the memento of love between her and her sister, proof of what had started the entire journey in the first place. He doesn’t have a special place in her life, and that is okay.

 

It’s not to say that he doesn’t care; he loves her like he loved his childhood, bittersweet and radiant and lost in time before he’s had the moment to remember and retrieve.

 

She taught him through her own terrible example that not everything is about anger. Sometimes joy and meaning are in those involuntary hugs, that slightest quiver of the lips and emotions that doesn’t even make it into the voice. She didn’t let him go for a little while and he let her, felt the warmth of the earth and not wanting to let go drain into his toes.

 

The first few days back at Palumpolum he feels lonely. Then he remembers her in her youth all alone with her sister and feels a little better, even though he also feels a bit lonelier.

 

They say disasters make and break dreams, that one who shares their bread under the pain of death is someone you can trust for life. He thinks he trusts a bit more than that, knows faith like the proudly rearing head of a thundering mount in rose petal rain. A goddess who remembered to never condone child sacrifice is one he’ll follow until the end of his life.

 

It was only a few months, after all; she should not have been able to shake him to his roots like this, convince him that the world can be changed, _should_ be changed. He glances up at the sun she’s helped him to save, touches the side of his cheek. His face isn’t the same. His jaw still remembers the moment when she gently tilted it into the path of her smile.

 

_There are some things in life you just do._

_Easy for someone like you to say_ , he echoes, a wry look in too-bloodshot eyes, reaching for a fourth-year Academy textbook barely two days into his second week at the institution. Six hundred and forty-two pages – for some reason, it doesn’t sound like it’ll last him even half a day.

 

He thinks he’s mourning her a little better than he mourned his childhood.

 

He buys bouquets to place on his table every anniversary of Cocoon’s Fall, a flower for each friend that had seen things through. He finds books on flower language but doesn’t quite find romantic connotations satisfying for the rose. As far as he’s concerned, she had been _spirit_ while Vanille had been _heart_ and Snow _faith_.

 

Every time he hears her name being mentioned he just gets this strange mix of wistfulness and reverence.

 

His father wonders if it’s love, and he says no, not really. How can you even love someone if you’ve never flirted with them or felt your heart rate pick up dramatically in their presence? He wasn’t even an adult. He just wants to protect her, make her feel cared for and happy. He wants to see her receive the bliss and appreciation she’s always deserved.

 

His father says there are many kinds of love, and you don’t have to want to sleep with someone to truly love them.

 

He hopes he will be able to keep his love for her safe until the moment they meet again.

 

Sometimes he wonders if she’s proud of him, wherever she is, fighting for however many eternities she must have spent fighting. He stares at himself for a bit critically in the mirror and chuckles a bit sourly, for when did she ever care about looks, and how could his achievements ever measure up to the miracles she’s conjured and maintained?

 

She’s the heroine that’s always part reality and part myth, part the mortal woman he knew and part the scintillating glory of an epic –

 

It’s unfair to her, he knows, putting her on that kind of pedestal, but he hopes the illusion would break once she’s back in their midst again, and he’ll once again be convinced that she’s real when she’s laughing right next to him, chastising him for bad combat form, reminding him to watch out for daggers in the dark –

 

 _We romanticize things that we can’t see_ , he’s read somewhere, _we romanticize things that we have lost._ A half dozen farseer myths have arisen from cities lost to war and greed, monsters and beloved derived from anger and grief. Human hearts are fickle things, to bend all into the shape and narrative they desire to behold and cherish –

 

But if he can’t trust her, what can he even trust in this life?

 

He keeps walking.

 

In his dreams she refuses his healing spells on Gran Pulse, asks him to keep them for himself. His sounds of protest are drowned out by the sounds of hooves and cannon fire in Valhalla, a thousand eidolons surrounding her lone form and asking her to submit. She defeats them one by one until the goddess acknowledges her as Her own.

 

 _There’s a way_ , she taught him. _There’ll be a way out as long as you don’t give up. Even if the entire world is against you. Even if the gods’ wills themselves are arrayed against you. Even if you are alone in an alien landscape full of chaos and death, and the throne of light is empty._ A Hope Estheim dies in a timeline riddled with bullets but still holding a smile on his lips, for he knows he will not go astray.

 

Sometimes when research or negotiations are at dead ends and his mind is too muddled from overthinking, he replays that recording of her riding Odin in Valhalla, facing down Caius without a hint of fear or hesitation in her gait. It keeps him determined and humble.

 

He tries not to think too much about her otherwise. Her lesson and struggle are neither about him nor about herself. They are about everyone. Getting too distracted by his source of inspiration would not get him anywhere when there are soon-to-be homeless children crying out for shelter.

 

It’s fulfilling, he tells himself. He’s following in her footsteps and doing what he must to make this world a better place.

 

It feels hollow sometimes. But only sometimes. Every rose he buys and waters invariably dies, until he purchases a small plot in the community garden and plants a few of them himself.

 

He makes good progress. He manages to escape into new timelines and centuries, build new devices. If all goes well with his friends and colleagues, they’ll even build a new world. When he meets her in his dreams she seems content, satisfied. His brain hasn’t yet become so cruel as to hallucinate him an image of her that will tell him otherwise.

 

~~(Unless it’s all just a coping mechanism.)~~

 

He gently shoves the thought from his mind, continues to labor away. Hope shines brightest as it burns, after all. He’ll have to become the embodiment of his name if he’s to generate enough cause to bring her back into the world.

 

He’s almost scared of the prospect of her coming back.

 

Too many things have changed, from his height and build to the way others refer to him, call him the Director and the leader of humanity. He knows he’s only frightened because he hates to think of it ending badly, wants too much for it to end well. The craving is a bird in his chest, an awfully childish thing that wants to be validated, comforted.

 

He dreams of falling as much as he dreams of flying.

 

He drops the request when Serah and Noel remind him of his duty, returns to the pillar. Lightning herself wouldn’t have wanted him to face Caius head-on, abandon their old comrades to be crushed under the weight of their own sacrifice. He watches the camera fondly as the researchers make away with the two smaller pieces of crystal, lead them somewhere safe.

 

The god of light rises gracefully into the sky as he bursts into a run.

 

Everything seems perfect, better than anything he’s ever imagined, until they are not. Chaos pours forth from every invisible orifice of the world and he’s mortified, the panic building slowly as he shouts commands left and right, forces the emergency evacuation clause he never thought he’d have to evoke. The world drowns in a sea of oil slick and he spends the next few months building life rafts.

 

When it’s all over – when everything is truly, irrevocably, damaged beyond repair, he hears himself asking, in a slightly robotic voice, _so what had happened to Light?_

 

Everyone has their own separate cause of grief, so he gets no answers, and spends a few more months comforting the others instead. He has the blessing of ambiguity while others do not, so he tries as much as he can, and – isn’t the passing of Serah his loss, too?

 

He tries harder to mourn Serah. He throws up twice as much as before because he still can’t handle drinking with Snow.

 

Snow starts refusing to answer his calls.

 

He contemplates mourning, making a beeline for the acceptance stage of grief where he’ll be okay with the idea that Lightning likely just perished with the goddess, was caught in the merging of the dimensions. She’s not the person to sit idly by as her sister dies and the world falls into ruin. His idea of the world is her idea of the world and it’s crashing in spectacular fashion.

 

Is it better to bury a body or to never see it at all?

 

He leaves specific instructions for the expedition teams and takes doses of chemicals to keep up his concentration. He doesn’t want to know what would happen if he is to break.

 

Besides that literally everyone will be disappointed in him and the world will end even more than it already has and why won’t the pharmacist just prescribe him the dose he requested?

 

He visits Sazh and hates himself for realizing that he’s only adamantly helping others to distract himself from his own pain.

 

A small mocking laugh escapes him when he intimidates a political rival for the first time, forces the man to hurriedly flee the room in fear.

 

~~(He keeps laughing. It’s all so terrible, he can’t stop. It’s not long before he buys a tissue box and asks for better sound insulation in his office.)~~

 

It’s taking too damn long for this world to really end.

 

The oracle drive had been destroyed during evacuations, so there’s nothing more to see. He’d started feeling awful about using her as a literal motivational device anyway.

 

Words finally come, from Poltae, but it’s a whole month before he finally finds a break in his schedule.

 

Over that month, he visits his pharmacist six times.

 

All the office meetings don’t make for an easy hiking trip, but he takes his time. Hanging on a cliffside with one hand on a branch, he contemplates falling, before closing his eyes and slowly climbing back.

 

The light from the headlamp scatters back haphazardly from the form of crystal and he stares, lets the lantern in his hand fall and clatter to the floor. He stands and regrets not falling.

 

\- He struggles up, _reaches_ up, and stops. There have been no steps laid out for him to ascend to the throne. What right does he have to remove her from her rest, her calling?

 

 _The goddess is dead_ , he remembers Noel saying, and it hurts him in a way that it didn’t hurt him back then. She hasn’t abandoned him – it’s not like that, he knows better to think it’s like that – yet it’s never really been about _him_ or _her_ , either, and as he cuts the rope and falls in an unceremonious heap into the chaos pool below, he wonders if everything she’s ever said to him had been a lie, if the world’s ever really been worth trying to save.

 

What would she say now, looking down at his wounded and worn form, serene and perfect from her divine throne, eternal in her grief? They now belong in two different worlds.

 

Empathy stirs, visions of what she must have endured, yet betrayal also coils in his gut, a wish for a different ending that overwhelms in its forcefulness. To understand her decision would be to stay here with her, to similarly give into despair and grief. To live is to leave.

 

The acid in his throat from drinking with Snow flares back into acute focus, and he sprawls out on the ground surrounded by all the chaos, straining his eyes to try to see the stars. There’s only one artificial moon soon to perish from all the decay.

 

The chaos is surprisingly cushy and warm. He can probably make a bed out of it, if he wanted to.

 

He sleeps in the oil slick to spite everything he knows about the world’s past and present.

 

Only obstinacy leads him back out of the temple, and he recalls how he used to think it was his worst quality, that overarching irrational desire of a child that had once led him to that rooftop in Palumpolum.

 

Everything Lightning’s ever taught him has been love and not even her suicide can tell him otherwise.

 

He spends the next day a drunkard on the streets of Poltae and returns to work the day after that.

 

It’s the sixth century AF in the middle of a disease epidemic, and he wants to believe that his spite will die before the rest of the world’s population.

 

For his birthday in 531 Snow makes him the worst cake he’s ever seen, and he tells Snow that it tasted just like the last cake he baked for his father before Bartholomew passed away at age 58. Snow looks bashful and makes promises for improvement. They laugh at how they have all the time in the world but are seriously running out of icing sugar.

 

Snow always seems to know too much while he never seems to know enough. It’s a reversal from their youth that he feels like he’s never going to get used to.

 

More years pass, and the unnaturalness of their situation doesn’t bother him anymore, even though once in a while he still feels an acute pang of strangeness and pain. Talking to someone who’s just lost a loved one usually snaps him out of it.

 

It ceases to bother both him and Snow that they’d likely live far many normal lifetimes than the Farron sisters, mostly because both of them no longer believe they’ll ever get them back.

 

He gets really good at the epideictic, especially funeral orations.

 

The AMP team stops asking questions about the crystal-thawing team when he tells them that public outcry has led to the withdrawal of funding, while the truth is all the experts on that team have been eaten by a behemoth.

 

It took more than a century for Snow to realize he’s holding some kind of very deep sated grudge against Lightning, and he mourns how his acting skills must have deteriorated. He thought it’d take _at least_ three more centuries for Snow to figure it out.

 

Snow already knows about his other feelings for Lightning, though.

 

Without Lightning’s ideals holding him up, sometimes things just really feel next to impossible. Snow helps, but even Snow can’t stop the advance of the chaos, and the big man is devastated when his now-unsustainable idealism is called out to his face. He tells Snow that they can bond over how they’ve both absolutely lost everything.

 

He’s too old and tired to keep constantly checking his thoughts and actions to make sure that he’s on the right side of morality. The realization terrifies him, so he tells Snow to put him down if he ever goes past the edge. Snow looks bemused, stares at his own l’Cie mark for a while, and says Noel can do the honors instead. Neither of them has heard anything from Noel for what must have been years, so he warily says thanks.

 

The AMP team tells him the joyous news decades into the ninth century, and he spends the night sleeping at the base of Etro’s throne. It is terribly reckless and sentimental, but he hasn’t worked in that team for more than two centuries, and he’s never felt closer to home.

 

He gets a call from Snow asking him if he’s alright because apparently the council he’s working with has been unsettled by how much happier he sounded in his most recent speech. He decides that Snow has become a better politician than him.

 

He sets up a dozen cameras and a series of interlocking barrier protections when the first scientist goes missing, but their disappearances defy all logical explanation, and he can’t stay with them up in Bhunivelze when he’s needed on the surface.

 

The last trio of researchers promises that he’ll be able to complete the research on his own and he tells them stories of how every woman with rose-colored hair he’s ever known would only want to see a happy ending.

 

The last woman vanishes into the air in the middle of his embrace and he’s not ready to let go.

 

It’s not really Lightning, he knows; the woman he used to know was not elusive, would not so casually destroy everything he’s worked towards without even an explanation. He wants to think it’s all just a hallucination or nightmare in his head, but all the desks are still empty, and he can still hear all the machines conducting tests without their humans.

 

He replaces a good number of pharmacists until he finds one who’s willing to simply give him the key to the storage and restock every week.

 

Sleep is forgotten as he works on the surface during the day and ascends during the night; he’ll see it through even if nobody else could. If it really was Light, she’d have to get through him, wouldn’t she?

 

He sees her as he wakes up, as he works and as he lies down to his naps, and he almost thinks they are partners again.

 

She never shows her face and it’s driving him crazy.

 

He starts recording the occasions when he sees her. He reasons to himself that it’s good research to probe at her possible origins, to rule out the possibility that it’s all in his head, but it doesn’t sound convincing and he just ends up staring forlornly at the same desk corner all afternoon.

 

One time she apologizes for crystallizing herself and promises that she’ll stay with him until he’s worked out the last part of the AMP research, and he’s so happy he doesn’t realize that what he’s hugging isn’t quite corporeal.

 

Her face is the same when he does see it again, except smiling. He tries to take another trip to Poltae to compare the expressions, only to have her save him from (and chastise him for) a fall just before the bridge.

 

Apparently he’s grown too weak and tired to do any more hiking or climbing. They make tea instead and he’s glad that she shares his taste.

 

She lets him lean against her as he sleeps and it’s warm like Gran Pulse and the white couches in Bhunivelze. He doesn’t call her mother this time.

 

He makes a hundred promises about the world they’re going to save together, and she makes one, to be his goddess. It sounds wrong.

 

They’ve been to the Wildlands a few times together now, but she never feeds the birds.

 

She takes him down to the couples’ walk in Yusnaan and gets Olga to play his favorite song, her favorite song, but then she tries to hold his hand and he flinches and she’s abruptly gone.

 

Just outside of Luxerion’s city hall he tells her that he doesn’t love her like that and she shoves him against the wall, kisses him hard and raw until he’s out of air and the last train is gone. He admits that it’s not as bad as he thought since they’ve known each other as adults for, it must have been years now?

 

He’s unsettled by just how much she seems to want him, though. He just wants to be her orbiting moon, a faithful companion who’ll always be there to care and protect, but some nights she seems to want to devour him completely.

 

Sometimes he remembers he hasn’t been up in Bhunivelze for a long time, but she tells him it’s not yet time.

 

 _What time?_ He’d ask, feeling like he’s forgotten something very, very important.

 

 _Time for us to be together, forever_ , she responds, and it doesn’t sound like her but who else could it sound like and he doesn’t care, is too tired to care. He finally convinces the farmers in the Wildlands to lower the prices of their produce and it’s almost night. He slumps against the comforting orange of his chocobo and she picks him up, tells him that it’ll be alright.

 

He believes her even though he knows at one point he didn’t.

 

She’s the optimist now; the one who’s filled with hope and spirit instead of grief and weariness, the one who insists on bringing about a new world. She’s _him_ and _more_ and he wants to scream every time she roughly pulls him close in bed, tells him that she wants him, wants _something_ from him. They still do it. They do it every night because he must have a special place in her life to be okay.

 

The image of the living room and the birds have never felt so far away.

 

Her breath tickles his hair as she guides him to the center of Bhunivelze, towards eternity and oblivion. He mourns the her that he once knew and the him that once knew how to love.

 

 _Remember the world_ , the heart whispers between carnal craze and splitting agony, reaching for fear and humanity and in a body of celestial will and eternal light, _remember the hug. Remember the birds._

The heart tries but loses itself along the way.

 

 

 

_“Did you love me?” asks Lightning softly, her back against his bedroom door and her figure half-obscured in the descending darkness of the dusk. There’s an uncertainty and guilt in it that’s neither quite like the woman he loved as a child nor the phantom he fell for as an adult._

_He looks up and prays it’s the arrival of the birds._

**Author's Note:**

> A real shout out to [uraa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/uraa) for their wonderful work! out in rain really made me strive to do more of a show, not tell thing, and although I'm obviously still struggling a lot with it, I hope I've made some progress. The whole snippet style/layout is a true thing of beauty and quite inspiring in itself; if you're a fan of ToZ I really recommend it (and the rest of their body of work in general, it's truly quite great).
> 
> Another thing about the bird - it's like an innocent love, a feeling of home where you'll be wanted, a knowing that you'll be cared for and understood. I'm still working on my overarching metaphors and this work is quite rushed, but hopefully I've conveyed at least a little bit of that feeling, of how it relates. The impetus behind this work is a sinking feeling that Bhunivelze may have twisted and made sexual something that was originally quite pure (not that all Hoperai has to work like that, and not that all of my Hoperai works will be like that, but this is just one specific interpretation case) - it's a compelling take to me, so I figured it probably deserves its own fic.


End file.
